Losing the "eyes in the back of our heads": social service skills, lean caring, and violence

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Sept, 2004 by Donna Baines

Violence in the social services work place in general, and the developmental services in particular, has increased in the last several years. Findings from an ethnographic study suggests that new, lean forms of work organization remove opportunities to use or learn many of the tacit or practice skills workers previously used to keep themselves and their clients safer in the work place. This article describes many of these skills and the new management schemes that remove the possibility to develop or transmit these praxis skills. The article concludes by analyzing the convergence between the new labour processes and the competency approach to work place skills. Noting the loss of praxis skills that kept workers and clients safer, the conclusion highlights the hidden costs to developmental sector clients and workers.

Key words: violence, social services, skills, workplace, labour, safety, workers

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While non-fatal injury and occupational illness rates have been falling in workplaces across Canada and the United States, rates in health care and the social services have been soaring (Boyd, 1995; National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2000). Evidence from one Canadian province indicates a tenfold increase in claims from social service workers (Boyd, 1995). Many of these claims seem to be related to the high level of client perpetrated violence against staff. In Canada, the rate of injury in the developmental services sector is higher than that in other parts of the social services. The developmental services sector is a subsector of the social services which provides community services to people with intellectual disabilities. Until de-institutionalization in the 1970s, most people with intellectual disabilities spent their lives in long-term care facilities or asylums (Charlton, 1996; Michalko, 2002; Oliver, 1996). While some argue that the impetus behind de-institutionalization was a recognition of the rights of people with disabilities to reach their full potential, others assert that inadequate funding has resulted in the continued warehousing and stigmatization of people with intellectual disabilities (albeit in smaller settings), rather than their integration into a caring community (Braddock and Hemp, 1997; Taylor and Bogdan, 1989; Traustadottir, 2000).

Like other parts of the social services sector, the developmental services sector has, in recent years, been hit with funding cuts, and has integrated new mandates and models of management that lean out service delivery, and reflect a move away from social obligation and mutual responsibility (Baines, 2004a, 2004b; Abramovitz and Withorn, 1999; Clarke and Newman, 1992; Fabricant and Burghardt, 1997). Part of this new lean model and logic of service delivery is a reformulation of workers' skills. Under restructuring, skills are no longer recognized as a complex synergy of individual and collective knowledge that develop incrementally and over time. Rather, skills are recast as "competencies" or "human capital" that workers should own or obtain (Jackson, 1997). Competencies or skills are measured against "value-added, which means basically contributions to profits." (124) Dominelli and Hoovgelt (1996) note that the notion of "competencies" was introduced as "a way of defining the core skills professionals needed to do the jobs which employers wanted them to do" (55), rather than defining core skills within the broader context of what social service workers should be doing. Within the competency framing of skills, if activities and interactions in the social services do not contribute to cost-saving, they are likely to be eliminated from the prescribed tasks and routines of workers.

This restructured managerial and skill regime appears to be one of the major shifts that has increased the risk and likelihood of violence in the developmental sector. A recent ethnographic study of three developmental service agencies in Ontario, Canada showed that, while violence is endemic in the developmental services workplace, many workers, particularly those hired prior to social service restructuring, displayed skills that appear to significantly reduce client-perpetrated violence (Baines, Hadley, Pollack, Slade, Brooker, Fay, Lewchuk, Preston, and Dimatrova, 2002). These skills were not generally found in the academic text books, compentencies discourse, or performance management literature that guides most contemporary approaches to human service management. Known in the skills literature as tacit-knowledge (Darrah,1997), these skills were learned on the job by workers who had sufficient time and support to develop a sense of working as an informal team, and to learn from each other, their clients, and their own lived-in experience. While managerial approaches such as Total Quality Management (TQM) purport to capture and make use of tacit-skills, in most work places, the empowerment aspects of TQM are never realized and the approach to skills continues to operate under a top-down, human resources framing which denies the existence of tacit-skills, the social nature of work and learning, and the importance of interpersonal networks in the workplace (Darrah, 1997; Manwearing and Wood, 1984). Indeed, various aspects of the contemporary organization of developmental services work means that opportunities to use, learn and transmit these tacit-or praxis-level skills are being eliminated, along with the skills themselves, and the greater safety they provided to workers and clients.